Moving away from the quantitative approach of Chapters 1 and 2, Chapter 3 considers service magicians’ social position. The chapter begins by exploring the official stance towards magic and magicians over the period: what sort of archetypal image is painted by ecclesiastical and secular authorities, and how this changed over the centuries. This (overwhelmingly negative) characterisation acts as a point of comparison against popular attitudes towards service magic, and treatment of wizards in reality. The second section considers magicians living in London and uses their domiciliary location as a lens to look at how they lived and practised. Through this approach we see that most practitioners, though living on the edge of the city, were nevertheless carefully positioned to be as accessible to their client base as possible. Further investigation of court records and popular media (primarily plays) of the time demonstrates that service magicians were a recognised, even occasionally celebrated, part of London life. This leads to a conclusion that magic was broadly accepted in wider society, at least in an urban context.

The ways in which migrants express, construct and negotiate their identities reveal a dynamic interplay between their discourses on how they relate to the world and the representations that shape their sense of belonging. In urban contexts, individuals’ plurilingual repertoires and transnational identities display the constant mediation migrants are involved in when they navigate their social trajectories. Migrants’ plurilingual repertoires and practices emphasize the role of language(s) in the exercise of power and illustrate how urban spaces participate in sociolinguistic stratification. However, by crossing borders between languages, cultures and spaces, migrants counterbalance the effects of the segregation that cities may impose on them and set in motion new complex plural affiliations to re-appropriate their life stories. In doing so, they break away from dominant homogeneous social discourses; they cut across the traditional deficit perspective associated with their language practice and give value to plurilingualism.

Medieval writing in German is characterized by a tension between religious and secular elements from the very beginnings of writing in the vernacular. The chapter therefore challenges conventional views of medieval German literature and its relationship with religion and argues for a complex, often self-aware negotiation of differences between secular and religious points of view. Gender plays a significant role in these negotiations from the beginning, because religious women writing in Latin as well as the vernacular explore new modes of articulating a relationship with God in literary texts. In setting out the complex and manifold ways in which medieval poets across the centuries explore the position of the human against transcendental forces, the chapter thus questions the common master-narrative which sees the Reformation as a radical break with earlier practices, arguing instead for a literary culture in which formation and re-formation of the self are negotiated in multiple ways.